Scorecard & Ranking

Our Pharma Integrity Scorecard ranks the 20 largest pharma companies and each new medicine and vaccine on key ethics, human rights, and public health criteria, beginning with R&D and clinical trial transparency.

Why are Ranking and Transparency Important?

The safety and efficacy information for the medicines we use are contained in clinical trials, the human experiments largely sponsored by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. These trials, how they are done and their results, must be transparent and publicly available, because:

Prescription guidelines, medical care, and formulary decisions are based on reviews of the publicly available trial information.

Thousands of people participate in important industry-sponsored trials each year, believing they are helping advance medical knowledge, which is not the case if the trials are unpublished.

Transparency is important for building merited trust in the life sciences sector and their work: As few as 12% of Americans trust that drug companies are honest and ethical. This distrust can be a substantial barrier to patients participating in clinical trials and to patients taking their medicines.

Only two companies publicly disclosed 100% of their drugs’ clinical trial results.

About half of all clinical trial results are publicly disclosed.

Positive results are twice as likely to be published as unfavorable results.

Not publishing negative results undermines evidence-based medicine and puts millions of patients at risk for using ineffective or unsafe drugs [including for common ailments like arthritis, depression and high cholesterol]. — Institute of Medicine, (U.S.) Committee on Conflict of Interest in Medical Research, Education, and Practice